Everything about pumpkin spice belongs in the holiday season!
Whether it is the “Special Edition” Pumpkin Spice Latte, Pumpkin Spice Doughnuts, or even “Limited Edition” Pumpkin Spice Oreos. There is something truly special about pumpkin spice and how it has become ubiquitous with the Fall season.
Yet, what happens if one day in early March…you decide its got a crisp chill in the air and you need a Pumpkin Spice Latte? You walk into Starbucks (or your other favorite coffee shop) and order a Pumpkin Spice Latte. After a few awkward exchanges, a couple of blank stares, you realize that the Baristas look as if they are about to check your temperature.
They politely ask, “Do you realize what month this is?”
You respond, “Sure, but I’m really craving a Pumpkin Spice Latte.”
Now, slightly irritated and with customers piling up, they respond, “Sorry, we can’t help you, that is out of season. Please order something from our regular menu.”
However, humorous (and unfortunately, personally very real) this exchange was it speaks to a greater struggle. Keeping the spice for life alive outside of the holiday season.
I mean, it’s easy to feel the specialness of life when everyone else exudes it during the months of November and December. It’s easy to remember being grateful when we are finding constant reminders snuck in throughout our daily minutia. But, what happens when that is not on the regular menu of life?
King Solomon in Ecclesiastes 1:2-9 speaks to this struggle:
2 “Meaningless! Meaningless!”
says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.”
3 What do people gain from all their labors
at which they toil under the sun?
4 Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever.
5 The sun rises and the sun sets,
and hurries back to where it rises.
6 The wind blows to the south
and turns to the north;
round and round it goes,
ever returning on its course.
7 All streams flow into the sea,
yet the sea is never full.
To the place the streams come from,
there they return again.
8 All things are wearisome,
more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing,
nor the ear its fill of hearing.
9 What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
Wow…doesn’t that feel like the humdrum of life sometimes. We are beating our heads against the wall to realize that what we had been beating our heads against the wall for has already been figured out. Or worse the efforts we have poured out feel like a waste.
Yet, does it have to be this way? Do we have to surrender the spice for life that the holiday season naturally, almost spontaneously, erupts in all of us?
Spice for life is a perspective, a frame of mind. Each day by our choices we put on different glasses to see our world. Lives that seem normal (boring as some put it) actually are “spiced” in their own special way for the one living that life’s journey. It is not our responsibility to find the spice for someone else’s life, we need to find the daily spice of our own lives. By doing so we accept that each of our lives are unique, beautiful, and purposeful in ways that we will never comprehend.
There is no exact recipe for a good life. And thank goodness…so don’t let the “limited” availability of Pumpkin Spice restrict you from spicing up your life year round!
Perennial Educator 